Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia  just said (CNN), “I think it is very facile for people to say ‘Oh, torture is terrible,'” he said. “You posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people.”

Former F.B.I. interrogation expert Ali Soufan, cited for his conviction that torture does not work, has something interesting to say at the end of a PBS interview, at 28:40. “I oppose them mainly from an efficacy perspective…If it was saving lives…Look, if it was saving lives, and I saw that it was saving lives, Look I hate to tell you, and probably I will be attacked, but yes, maybe…” You owe it to Mr. Soufan to go to minute 28:40, and not rely on my partial transcription. You owe it to him to hear the hesitancy of his voice, and his inability to articulate the exact conditions under which he would use torture. Maybe nobody can. Maybe you just have to be there.

Justice Scalia gives me the courage to continue to write about this subject. I am not myself a conservative thinker, and my reference to his statement is not to prove torture is OK.  But Judge Scalia gives evidence that, even with a lifetime of focus on jurisprudence and necessarily concomitant ethics, the answer is not obvious, and so, worthy of discussion. This series of posts might help a personal eclectic synthesis.

In the past, torture has come so easily to human beings in every region, and every time period, that there must be, for some, an element of enjoyment in the infliction. The movie Zero Dark Thirty, of which the first half hour is a torture scene, was made with the creative input of some pretty canny Hollywood execs, who think they know what the public wants to see. Sitting through the first 30 minutes would be torture, so I haven’t watched it. But the Internet Movie Database  pollsters gave  it a “thumbs up,” with 181,394 viewers rating it a 7.4/10.

It appears that, as an elective activity,  the attractiveness of torture lies somewhere between sex and self-mutilation. That so many Zero-Dark viewers enjoyed watching it implies that a significant minority of the unincarcerated population, particularly males, have a sociopathic potential. So it wasn’t hard for the C.I.A. to find employees willing to conduct “enhanced interrogation.” But they might have been overpaid. Milgram got his volunteer torturers for 4 bucks an hour.

So the historical purpose of torture may have been enjoyment, permitted against those who transgressed the social order. Even the claims of the Catholic Inquisition, “…for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit”, are suspect. They may have enjoyed their work a little too much.

But today, it is fairly clear that, apart from the motives of the interrogators themselves, about which I know nothing and decline to guess, the motive for torture, a.k.a. “enhanced interrogations” was fear. Those who authorized the measures, and who are themselves significant enough to be judged by history, were afraid.

Next: The Anatomy of Fear.